In continuation of the work carried out since 2018, the Directorate General of Health (DGS) and the ANSM remain fully committed to setting up experimentation with the medical use of cannabis in France. However, due to the necessary mobilization of health authorities to manage the COVID-19 epidemic, the start of the experiment, initially scheduled for September 2020, is postponed until January 2021 at the latest.
Conducted in collaboration with the members of the ANSM Scientific Committee and the learned societies concerned, the work for the next implementation of the experiment has recently made it possible to consolidate various actions:
- criteria for inclusion and non-inclusion of patients;
- the design of the national electronic register for monitoring patients included in the experiment;
- the specifications allowing the selection of future suppliers and distributors of cannabis-based drugs used for experimentation;
- the development of the training platform for health professionals. Operational in December 2020, it will allow trained doctors to prescribe cannabis for medical use and pharmacists to deliver it;
- the list of volunteer expert centers that will include patients in the experiment.
These elements could be made available from the publication of a decree expected by the summer.
To find out more, consult our file on medical cannabis and the FAQ to answer your questions.
As a reminder, the
ANSM initiated work on cannabis for medical use in September 2018 by the creation of a scientific committee on the evaluation of the relevance and the feasibility of making cannabis available for therapeutic use in France.
It has been deemed relevant for patients in certain clinical situations and in cases of insufficient relief or poor tolerance of accessible therapies, whether or not they are medicinal. This use should be considered in addition to or as a replacement for certain therapies.
In order to test this use in real conditions, the ANSM decided to carry out an experiment making it possible to assess the feasibility of the circuit providing cannabis for patients.
